The beginning.

I stand on the precipice and wish for the ordinary, the normal, the mundane.  So many people seem to seek excitement, adventure and a thrill, but I’ve had that all my life.  My whole life has been an adventure and even at the advance age I am now, my life hasn’t settled back into anything ordinary. 

In your forties you are supposed to be able to sit back and enjoy the life that you have created.  You are supposed to be settled and twenty years away from retirement, not starting all over.  But then I haven’t seemed to do anything the easy way.  From the time I was little I knew life was meant to be a challenge.  Who really needs the details of something that happened so many lifetimes ago, so let’s just say that growing up was an obstacle course of adventures that taught me valuable life lessons.   Some of which I still live by today. So, to begin this let me tell you a little about me.

My childhood could be classified as “Poor-White-Trash”.  I had a vast collection of hand me downs and thrift store rejects, literally, it was a collection of clothes and toys that people didn’t want to send to the Goodwill.  And I was happy for what I had, most of the time anyway.

 I remember this one time so vividly that it feels like I’m in the room when I think about it.  I had been given this beautiful blue dress.  It was the prettiest dress I had ever seen in a deep dark blue that was almost purple, the skirt was velvet and the bodice was covered in lace that had sequence and beads in a few spots that formed little clusters that sparkled and it came with matching shoes.  They were a size 7 ½, a little small for my almost size 9 feet, but I had never had shoes that matched a dress before and I was determined I was going to wear the outfit.   The next Saturday I jumped out of bed before the alarm went off; I carefully laid the dress across my bed and admired it again.  I got dressed slowly enjoying the feel of the velvet on my cool skin.  I suddenly understood how Cinderella felt after the fairy godmother had created a dress for her.  I was beautiful and my 13 year old self was going to take everybody’s breath away.  Every compliment offered went to my head and by the time church was over I felt like the most beautiful girl on the planet.  As the congregation left and everyone was mingling around in the lobby, suddenly I overheard one of the ladies say, “Juanita’s dress is a little tight, it fit Isabel so much better.  I hated that she outgrew it but you know that family doesn’t have much and it was better than throwing it out.” I know she didn’t mean anything bad by what she said, but I wanted to die as I felt every eye in the lobby turn in my direction.  As much as I wanted it to happen, the floor didn’t open up and swallow me.  The world didn’t come to an end.   No, I just smiled in her direction when she realized I had overheard her comment and went out and sat in the car until my family was ready to leave.   

So, yeah, usually not so many complaints about the hand that life had dealt me,  but then every once in a while, I felt like life just sucked… Basically, at the beginning of this story, I want you to understand that I don’t want pity, never pity!  I want to share the journey of discovery that I have uncovered by the pain and heartache that was life and perhaps at the end of the day inspire someone with my journey to live a life more ordinary.